


be all my sins remembered

by autoclaves



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Character Study, Future Fic, Gen, Immortality Angst, Introspection, but you can definitely chose to ignore and read as gen, the main relationship is platonic between clara & jack, tiniest bit of implied clara/doctor and jack/doctor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-02
Updated: 2020-03-02
Packaged: 2021-02-22 08:43:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22980076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/autoclaves/pseuds/autoclaves
Summary: Jack raises his glass high, a morphine toast to the past. “To us, then. The last living remnants of—” he breaks off, unable to put it into words and gesturing around the empty black expanse that surrounds the cruise instead.“The storytellers,” she says. “To us, the ones who live to tell the stories.”(We’re all stories in the end—it’s true. But in the time before the end comes, the ones left behind will become storytellers instead.)
Relationships: Jack Harkness & Clara Oswin Oswald
Comments: 2
Kudos: 32





	be all my sins remembered

**Author's Note:**

> i'm so excited for the new episode (no spoilers please) and it got me working on my old dw fics again! the bare bones of this one has been in my drafts for a long time so i thought i'd polish it up to publish properly. enjoy !!

So there they are, the man who cannot die and the woman who is not alive. 

Traditional human experience dictates that these things are diametrically opposed to each other, but they are not. They are the same, both stuck in the nebulous gray space that defines everything not either living or dying.

“Do you miss it?” he says, one day. It’s not the first time that question has come up. They like to pretend it is, anyway.

“Living?” she’ll ask in response, sometimes. She’s not sure what a heartbeat sounds like anymore, these days. “Running?” she’ll say, at other times, remembering a blue, blue box, and the feeling of sprinting through the stars like it would kill her if she stopped. The Impossible Girl and her Doctor. 

Once, she offers both. “Which one, living or running?” He directs a not-quite smile to somewhere beyond her shoulder, looking out at the universe spread behind them instead, and says, “Aren’t they the same thing?” 

(To both of them, they are. Maybe that is why they’d stayed with him, the Doctor and his bigger-on-the-inside box of miracles.)

—

They try intimacy, once, just for the sake of trying. She’s mourning, he’s not much better, and there is all of eternity to drown bad decisions in, so they try. 

They fail, spectacularly. Maybe it’s the alcohol, the grief, the presence of a third body that haunts the space between them, but whatever it is, the occasion marks a singularly bad experience for both of them. 

Afterwards, Jack kisses her forehead, and Clara lets out dry-heaving sobs as if she’s dying. He understands; better than anyone else in this corner of the universe.

—

“I used to know—someone with a condition similar to yours,” Jack tells her. She doesn’t miss how his voice breaks slightly on the word _someone_. “Not quite, though. He’d already died and we reanimated him. Don’t ask.”

Clara cocks her head at him, reading between the lines. “What happened to him? Your friend?”

He just stares at her. They’ve both been not-alive long enough now to know what happens to mortals, even ones that manage to come back once from the dead. 

“Memento mori,” Clara murmurs tunelessly. “Except for us, Jack Harkness.”

That night, she slips into his bedroom and squeezes his hands, even though she has no body heat anymore and it must do nothing at all to comfort him. “Tell me about them,” she says. All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story, and so sometimes stories are the only thing they have, people like her and Jack. 

( _We’re all stories in the end_ —it’s true. But in the time before the end comes, the ones left behind will become storytellers instead.)

“They were brilliant,” Jack tells her, voice hoarse. “They were so bloody brilliant and I was running so fast to try and keep them, but I couldn’t.”

—

“I hate him sometimes,” Clara says into the dark of the room. It’s always dark when they talk. Some things can’t be said otherwise. “He would have burned up a sun just to get to me—to all of us, really, all those little companions he travels with—but he’s never once realized that, for us, being human is all there is.” 

Jack is silent for a long while. She continues, knees tucked up into her body as the shadows shift across the wall. The chronoclock on the wall ticks off the seconds. “All that fragility. All that weakness. It’s a lovely thing, really.” 

“And you don’t have it anymore,” Jack says quietly. 

“All the planets he’ll raze for me won’t change that. I’m not human anymore.”

“No, you’re not. You’re impossible.”

“Says _you_ ,” Clara mutters, a little petulant, and the moment breaks. They both laugh longer than the joke really warrants—they have the time to spare, after all—until it grows brittle enough that neither of them can keep up the pretence anymore. 

—

Clara finds him on the outskirts of the Andromeda Galaxy after hitching a ride from—all right, fine, _stealing_ —a Rala lightspace carrier. Jack is in a high-security prison for starting a planetside revolution, or so he claims. 

It turns out high-security prisons can be alarmingly easy to break into. 

Jack grins at her, heart-stoppingly reckless against a backdrop of blaring alarms, and Clara swears she can feel the adrenaline washing through her veins as they race out of the compound to her illicitly-obtained spacecraft. 

The rush fades after they take off, safely ensconced in the piloting seats. Clara suddenly feels unbelievably tired. “You never stopped, did you?” she says. 

Jack hums, fiddling with the broken wrist strap of his vortex manipulator. It throws out a burst of angry sparks. “Stopped what?”

“Running. Saving people. Doing the things he does.”

“He does that to you, you know. The Doctor.” It’s the first time either of them have mentioned him by name. To name a thing means to give it meaning, and Clara isn’t sure she believes in the Doctor’s anymore. “Traveling with him changes you.”

“When you’re out there trying to pretend you’ve left it for good, the thrill of it,” Clara says slowly. “Do you ever find yourself becoming him, Jack?”

Jack doesn’t look her in the eye. 

He has a darkening split lip and a faulty vortex manipulator and the remnants of a grin still on his face. Clara decides to pass on the judgement. One day, and all too soon, she’ll wake up and find the same thing happening to her.

—

_fin._

“Didn’t expect you here.” He slides into the booth opposite to her with a shot of some hard liquor or the other. Her hair is styled differently now, archaic Earth-style pin curls wide and loose around her head. She’s rippling a violently blue liquid around and around in its glass even though he knows for a fact her digestive system has long since shut down. 

“In the wealthiest viewing ship that currency that can buy, watching the slow destruction of my former home galaxy? Sounds exactly up my alley.” She eyes him up and down. “If anything, I thought you’d have no taste for it.”

“It’s my former home galaxy too. What’s the harm in a little morbid indulgence?”

“Mhm,” she says leisurely, creating a perfect whirlpool in her drink. They sit there, watching the white core of Sol 42 (known simply as the Sun to the inhabitants of that particular solar system), the last remaining star in the Milky Way galaxy, burn dimly. 

They’re on the ship for—a very long time, at least. (Time rarely runs linearly in their minds, and when it does, it’s difficult to make sense of scale. It could have been an epoch. It could have been half a solar year.) It’s a large ship. Luxurious. A pleasure cruise for those with money to spare and time to spare, one equipped to support its passengers for eons as they appreciate the macabrely beautiful view outside. 

The next time they meet on its decks, Sol is only a pinprick of light in the gaping blackness of a truly dying galaxy. Most of the passengers have disembarked by now; the lightshow is over. It must be so cold on Earth, not that there would be anything left to feel it. 

“What’s the name this time, pretty lady?” He’s drinking again at the main window, a vast expanse of reinforced glass that looks onto Sol.

“Ephelaurine,” she says. “It means _impossible_ in the language of the local galactic cluster.” There is a dreamy sort of smile on her face. “And you, pretty boy?”

He shrugs. He’s been using a title for a long time. He hasn’t had a proper name in a while. “How about you decide?” 

“Jack Harkness,” she says decisively. The name she met him with. No better time to be maudlin than now, he supposes. 

_Ephelaurine, meaning impossible._ The Impossible Girl, nursing an electric blue drink and the long-gone hope that the Doctor will come back for her. Idly watching the last vestiges of her galaxy burn.

Jack raises his glass high, a morphine toast to the past. “To us, then. The last living remnants of—” he breaks off, unable to put it into words and gesturing around the empty black expanse that surrounds the cruise instead.

“The storytellers,” she says. “To us, the ones who live to tell the stories.”

**Author's Note:**

> ugh this needs more editing imo but i'm so tired !!
> 
> also i'm obsessed with the idea of clara and jack afraid of becoming too much like the doctor. i feel like it would absolutely haunt the early stages of their immortality, particularly clara. then it'd eventually swing the other way and they'd become jaded, dissolute immortals cut off from the concept of humanity with huge fortunes and a lot of time to spare.
> 
> title is from hamlet  
> "all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story" is by author karen blixen (and i personally found it on a hannibal episode lmaoo)  
> phrase "morphine toast" is from the film third star  
> any other recognizable quote is from doctor who!
> 
> tumblr: @doctortwelfth


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